November, 2011
Piscator says-- that he is puzzled that the recent programs on PBS’s Nova about string theory as a possible explanation of
everything about our universe fail to take a step back to
discuss the problem of
language itself. Can it bear the burden of the secrets of the universe?
Piscator fears there may be a great gulf fixed between our daily
language and cosmological understanding. For instance; is it really of any help
to compare the universe to slices of a loaf of bread, each slice representing
a “membrane” on which our universe is made up of strings-- and the next slice of the
loaf, another and parallel
universe? Piscator worries and so do I.
My
daughter tells me, in her new book, that the French philosopher Alain Badiou
holds that he can show mathematically that absolute Truths exit and enter
history as events. And so makes possible
a “new politics”.Yet he attempts to explain himself in our daily language.
It’s hard.
July,
2012
And now
we have the Higgs Bosom, the ultimate particle that may, in fact explain everything.
For a metaphor in order to think about it, we retreat to the language of
trekking through deep snow and the accretion of that snow to our feet.
Perhaps
the universe resides outside all possibility of metaphor…. The universe may be
like nothing but itself.
Anyhow,
I like the snow idea better than that of sliced bread-- which is another
problem: our emotional and aesthetic preferences for one metaphor over another.
Meanwhile, all that dark matter is still out there-- lurking, we think….
It
only gets harder.
